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Four poems by Christopher Citro

Christopher Citro

Christopher Citro's poetry appears or is forthcoming in Poetry East, Arts & Letters Prime, Fourteen Hills, The Cincinnati Review, the minnesota review, The Cortland Review, Tar River Poetry, Harpur Palate, and elsewhere. He has taught creative writing at Indiana University and the Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. His poetry has twice been featured on Verse Daily, and his awards include the 2006 Langston Hughes Creative Writing Award for Poetry and the Darrell Burton Fellowship in Creative Writing. He is currently completing an MFA in poetry at Indiana University.

The beavers built a dam at the foot of our bed,and now the mattress is beginning to float.I reach out to put my arm around you,knowing you're prone to seasicknessas we begin to bob and tip. A seagull passeslow across the headboard. When I see themin the parking lot down at the mall,they seem unpleasant, like flying rats.How odd, I say as I reach to bring my other armaround you, how majestic they arewhen seen in their proper environment.

For We, the Wide Awake

The backyard at night, powdered bonespread from porch to picnic table.The sky as blue as noon, clouds evenwhite with shimmering edges, the sortout of which birds fly. Being night,only bats emerged, swarming space,bringing a darkness to dark,clearing the air of stinging insects,of moths, peeking into curtained windows,looking for us—I'm guessing—as we lie awake in bed talking in circles."Is that not a robin's peek and tut?" "Is thata bluebird, a cooling breeze of jasmine?"

Plenty of Room Here Under the Big Top

The old man who lives behind our housetold us this was where the traveling circus used to sleep.We smiled and believed him—but only a little.Then while digging in the backyard for a petunia bedI hit the elephant's broad back with the shovel.Carefully I bent down to clear dark soilfrom the wide, pale forehead. I called to youwhere you were prying dandelions out of the lawnwith a steak knife. And you came running.(The woman I love.) You leapt into the hole with meand together we dug and scraped away to getdown to the elephant's feet, its ruby sandals glintingin the bright spring light. Now and then,I'd look over and catch a glimpse of your breastsshiny with sweat and dusted with soil inside yourblack tank top. You, too busy digging to notice,clearing a stray hair from your eyes now and then.It took hours and hours, but there she was,ten feet below the lemonade sweating on our porch:one perfect elephant preserved somehow just for us,leather headdress encrusted with gold and precious stones.I looked at you, almost unrecognizable nowfor soil, and you smiled at me—your teeth showinglike jewels through the dirt. I climbed out of our holeand reached for you. You took my hand.

Homeschooling Is Really Taking Off

Hallways shake with the muffled buffetof nothing echoing back from nothing.Paint bubbles from cinderblock wallsuntil even from outside it sounds as ifa herd of mastodons (extinct) are aboutto tear the place down from the inside out.No one's out there to hear, though.Just one car in the lot, a blue Volkswagen.In an office whose door never opens,sits the Principal of The Great UnknownElementary School—hunched over a crystal set,sending recorded samples of the silenceinto the sky, the dark matter, the somethingin the nothingness scientists tell usmust be up there for the everything elsethat is something, what little there is of it,not to come crashing in on itself.And for any second graderswho may have lost their way up there.